It’s official: for the first time in around 150 years, Louisiana has more registered Republicans than Democrats in the electorate, with implications.
Official beginning-of-month statistics give Republicans an over 2,000-registrant lead over Democrats. Compared to the year’s beginning, the GOP has added over 12,000 voters while Democrats have lost over 18,000. As the electorate increased by around 6,000, this means that all other voters gaining made up the 12,000 or so difference.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of the shift. Not even two decades ago when Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal became the first lifelong Republican to win the Governor’s Mansion, Democrats held a two-to-one advantage (and there were 134,000 fewer registrants then). That means the GOP has increased 52 percent since, while Democrats have dropped 41 percent. Even more dramatically, 65 years ago Democrats comprised 99 percent of the electorate.
A major portion of the reason why derives from the flat-out sprint to the far left that national Democrats have made, followed largely by state party elected officials and activists. The party left behind a large chunk of Louisianans who, unlike in every other state back then, operated in an electoral system that didn’t award parties registrants on the basis of candidates presented. The nonpartisan blanket primary system, still in effect for most elections within the state, didn’t penalize voters for not having their registration in line with their voting behavior but did neuter parties from having any control over to whom they could grant their most important inducement: a nomination for a general election.
So, since the legacy of Democrat registration existed, unless they felt compelled to vote in a presidential preference closed primary of their preferred (not their labeled) party, voters had no incentive to change registrations, leaving a huge latent registry of Democrats even though they often, even exclusively, voted for Republican candidates in the general election and runoffs. But this year adding to presidential primaries other federal races plus state multiple executive offices and Supreme Court positions (even as House of Representatives contests temporarily will remain subject to blanket primaries), much greater incentive came about to put registration in line with voting behavior.
Certainly, that had an impact. The middle of April marked the end of registration changes to participate in the May party primaries, and the changes in GOP registration from each month at the beginning of the year until May averaged about 1,000 gain each month, Democrat losses averaged about 2,500 monthly, and all others (97 percent of whom were no party and therefore could chose one party’s ballot on which to vote both in the May primary and end-of-June runoff) jumped a little over a thousand a month. In other words, Democrats appeared to be switching both to the GOP and no party status prompted by the new rule, and even some were falling off the rolls entirely.
Yet it’s obviously more than that. Since May, Republicans leapt almost 10,000 while Democrats fell 8,000 and no party folks gained 7,000. It’s possible that some portion moving about were Democrats abandoning that party to vote in the GOP Senate runoff, although Democrats had their own Senate runoff. The size of the movements, fivefold more for the GOP and almost twice as much for Democrats, however, suggest continued momentum favoring Republicans and penalizing Democrats. With nominations settled, it will be interesting to see how the pattern changes or if it does until November (even December, since delayed House elections possibly could see runoffs then), as electorate excitement builds (typically, registrations climb throughout an election year until voting occurs and ceases, and then it declines for several months until reaching another cycle).
No doubt the introduction of party nominations for some offices accelerated the process, but we can expect to see continued movement away from Democrats and towards Republicans (and signing on to no party) as long as the former continues careening to the far left and the latter keeps doing a better job of appealing to the median Louisiana voter.
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